Guy Kawasaki has spent decades in Silicon Valley, from the Macintosh division at Apple in the early 1980s to his current role as chief evangelist of Canva. Drawing on that long view of tech, entrepreneurship, and reinvention, he opens this UC Your Future talk by telling the audience exactly what he wants to do: explain “how to be a remarkable person.”
While he frames the presentation in a top 10 format, the real goal is larger than a career talk. Kawasaki is offering a practical way to think about work, creativity, and decision-making over a lifetime.
Kawasaki says the place to aim is the corner where you are “unique and valuable,” and he pushes the audience to think not just about success, but about distinct usefulness.
He makes one of his clearest arguments when he says, “Pain is where remarkable people make a difference, not pleasure,” shifting the conversation away from prestige and toward solving real problems.
Kawasaki builds his framework around 10 practical recommendations:
- Look for pain.
- Be the customer.
- Work backward from the customer.
- Ask simple questions.
- Get to the next curve, or invent it.
- Don’t wait for perfect.
- Eat what you bake.
- Plant a lot of seeds.
- Use all your weapons.
- Make your decision, then implement it.